[...]
An American mercenary, an old African hand, once told me that in Ethiopia there
is a spider that eats only living flesh. It's called the camel spider and is
equipped with a prong on its back that emits a local anaesthetic. He told me
that at night the camel spider descends while you sleep, gives you a shot, and
eats your lips. I slept with my hand over my mouth. [...]

At
a time when rumours of attacks have triggered large scale exodus of
North-Easterners from different parts of the country to their home states, a
mischievous phone call kept thousands of people in several districts of Andhra
Pradesh awake on Wednesday night.

The
rumour was that anyone who slept in the night would die in their sleep and
never wake up the next morning. This bizarre incident was witnessed not only in
the rural parts of Anantapur, Nizamabad, Kurnool, Mahbubnagar, Medak and Ranga
Reddy, but also in Old City of Hyderabad, where people came out of their houses
and spent the whole night on the streets discussing about the mysterious phone
call that forced them to undergo a sleepless night. [...]

Hyderabad: Rumor rampage ones again stole away the sleep of Muslims in Hyderabad. Yesterday
night when a rumor of girl born with ‘four hands and four legs’ and an
illogical prediction made by her spread like a wild a fire in old city.
According to the rumors a baby girl in Shaheen nagar area in the suburb of the
city was born with pecuniary [sic --
bc] features, started speaking and gave a warning that every child from 1 to 11
years of age will die if he or she slept before 2:a.m in the night. [...]

Panic
prevailed in parts of the old city on Wednesday night after a rumour of possible
death of children if they sleep in night started making rounds. Anxious parents
woke up their children and rushed out of their houses to prevent them from
sleeping. [...]

Carried
away by the rumours a large crowd gathered near the St. Ann’s hospital, popularly known as
‘Gudi-ka-dawakhana’ in Jahanuma, after rumours of the girl who predicted it
being admitted here. Driven by curiosity, hundreds of people gathered here
leading to tension in the area. The handful of policemen who reached here faced
tough time dispersing the public.

Have you heard the one about how Christians are
being nailed up on crucifixes and left to die in front of the Egyptian
presidential place? [palace -- bc] It's a story worth dissecting - not because
it's true (it isn't), but because it is a textbook example of how the Internet,
once thought to be the perfect medium of truth-seeking, has been hijacked by
culture warriors to fire up the naive masses with lies and urban legends. [...]

Earlier
this week, I debunked the story -- spreading like wildfire on WorldNetDaily and
other Internet sites -- that Christians were being crucified by the Muslim
Brotherhood in front of Egypt’s
presidential palace. As I noted, the story was based on nothing more than a
social-media rumor that had been posted for a few minutes on the Web site of
Sky News Arabic, before an alert Sky editor deleted it. [...]

Over
the last day or so, I have had an ongoing email correspondence with Michael
Carl, the WND reporter who wrote the
crucifixion article. He tells me he is sticking by his story. When I asked him
if he has “any information from any of the tens of thousands of people who
would have seen an actual ‘crucifixion’ if one really did take place in front
of the presidential palace,” he told me that he had. Tantalized, I pressed him
for details. Alas, he refused to divulge any of the evidence to me -- or anyone
else. If he did, he explained, the Muslim Brotherhood “would kill my sources.”
And so ended our correspondence. [...]

Chennai,
Aug 21 (TruthDive): The exodus of the N-E people that was undoubtedly caused by
rumour-mongers who want to create panic in the minds of the people has not yet
healed that, Muslim women and children in large numbers rushed to hospitals on
Eid eve after rumors were spread that two women lost their lives after applying
mehendhi on their hands and a girl lost her limbs. However police are looking
for the person who sent a text message that went viral on Monday night. [...]

[...]
Hundreds of women thronged various hospitals in Chennai, Vellore,
Coimbatore and many other places in the State in
the wee hours of Monday after rumours spread that mehendi, which they applied
on their body on the festival day, has led to the death of two persons in Bangalore. [...]

CHENNAI:
Hundreds of Muslim women and children flocked to hospitals late on Eid eve
after rumours spread that two women had died after applying mehendi on their
hands and a girl had lost her limbs. Police are on the lookout for the person,
who sent a text message that went viral on Monday night

Muslim
women wear mehendi during Eid. Several government hospitals received women and
children with mehendi on their hands, with complaints of itching and irritation
after they heard the rumours. Doctors said many of them were because of psychological
reasons.

The
mischievous text went like this: "A girl applied Mehandi (sic) called red
cone ... her hands and legs got infected, so doctors suggested to cut off her
hands and legs..." Police and doctors said the message was totally
baseless and intended to create panic among people. [...]

[...]
“The message actually emanated from Facebook and spread via chain-mails and
SMS. It stated that a girl who used one particular brand of cone mehndi had
developed serious skin allergy, which resulted in her death. There was another
SMS which said four people had died in Bangalore.
This is completely baseless…we have identified one mobile number involved in
the rumour. The Cyber Crime Police have been entrusted with the probe,” a top
police official told The Hindu. [...]

MANGALORE:
After preying on the battered psyche of students from the North-East, rumour
mongers had a field day targeting consumers of Nandini milk processed and
marketed by Dakshina Kannada Cooperative Milk Producers Union Ltd (DKMUL) on
Monday. A rumour that Nandini milk delivered to agents across Dakshina Kannada
and neighbouring Kasargod was adulterated (read poisoned) that spread as
wildfire was enough to cause panic. [...]

[...]
In Chikmagalur town, a vehicle went around the streets with a microphone asking
people not to buy milk, vegetables, curds, mehndi or perfume, saying they had
been laced with poison. According to witnesses, the announcement was made in
Urdu and in Kannada.

Chikmagalur
district police chief Shashi Kumar said some mosques in Chikmagalur asked the
community members to be cautious while using mehndi and perfume, but did not
include milk, curd or vegetables in the list.

I
was sitting in the control booth while Dylan was in the studio unmoving,
writing again. Al Grossman had made a habit of pitching quarters into the
soundproofed ceiling, and now everyone was doing it. I just knew when we left
town, some engineer was gonna turn up a bass track all the way and all them
fuckin' quarters was gonna rain down on the control room like a Las Vegas
jackpot.

Anyway,
me and Grossman and Johnston are pitchin' quarters, and this local newspaperman
had somehow got in. He was in there about an hour and a half just staring at
the motionless Dylan through the glass when he finally said, "Damn! What's
he on, anyhow?"

Grossman,
not wanting the facts to get distorted in this guy's potential scoop, tells
him, "Columbia Records, sir." The guy is ushered out shortly
thereafter.

[In
Kooper's liner notes to No Direction Home
(Columbia Records, 2005), a collection of Dylan outtakes, demos, and live
versions, he claims the obtuse journalist made two visits:]

Bob
would arrive, go to the piano in the studio and start changing a lyric.
Sometimes he would be in there for four or five hour stretches. The band took
it in good humor and played pool and ping pong, watched TV and catnapped. One
night a journalist somehow slipped in with a friend and was asked to come back
later as Bob was writing. He returned four hours later and Bob appeared to be
in the exact same position at the piano as when the journalist was originally
expelled.

"Man...what
is he ON?" the reporter asked no one in particular in a loud voice.

Bouverie
had written, 'A guest in Prague's most ambitious
hotel, the Alcron, when it passed yesterday from private into public ownership,
was novelist Graham Greene, who is in Prague
at the moment to lecture for the British Council. He looked forhis Communist waiter. He had been appointed
national administrator.'

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Damning rock music for it's "appeal to
the flesh," a Baptist church here has begun a campaign to put the torch to
records by Elton John, the Rolling Stones and other rock stars.

About
$2,200 worth of records were tossed into a bonfire this week after church
officials labelled the music immoral.

Rev.
Charles Boykin, associate pastor and youth director at the Lakewood Baptist
Church, said he has seen
statistics which show that "of 1,000 girls who became pregnant out of
wedlock, 984 committed fornication while rock music was being played."

TALLAHASSEE -- Brother Charlie Boykin is an earnest young man under fire, and he
sure hopes that his spiritual brother, Bob Combe, of the Hyles-Anderson
College in Hammond, Indiana,
can locate the source of those figures for him. [...]

Brother
Charlie has telephoned twice out to Hammond,
India to ask
about it. The first time, Brother Bob said he couldn't exactly remember where
they'd come from, he'd have to look through his files. The second time, Brother
Bob had gone off to deliver The Message, and Brother Charlie hopes he gets back
soon, and finds the source of those figures for him.

Brother
Charlie wishes everyone hadn't picked up so hard on the figures to begin with.
"That's not our main argument," he says again, so you'll understand.
[...]

But
people are after him about those figures, and if he's going to be giving the
Presentation again, Brother Charlie wants to be able to quote the source,
because a lot of people don't believe he knew what he was talking about when he
said it.

"Of
1,000 girls who became pregnant out of wedlock, 984 committed fornication while
Rock music was being played." That was what Brother Charlie said as part
of his Presentation. It was after that the kids at Lakewood Baptist
Church decided to burn
their Rock records. [...]

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (UPI) -- [...] The 25-year-old
minister has studied effects of pop music on youths for almost four years and
says his survey of high schools in north Florida supports a 1968 poll which he
says revealed that 984 out of a sampling of 1,000 girls who became pregnant out
of wedlock were listening to rock music during fornication. [...]

Rolling Stone, 12 February 1976, p. 15

Fahrenheit
250: Florida Minister, Flock, Fire Rock

By
Michael Bane

[...]
What's wrong with [those records], according to Brother Charlie, is their
appeal to the flesh; a sensuous, slithering quality that apparently sends
youngsters scrambling for the bedroom. In fact, he adds, of 1000 girls who
became pregnant out of wedlock, 984 committed fornication while rock music was
being played. Brother Charlie cites a 1968 issue of Time magazine as his source, but neither the magazine nor Frank
Garlock, the Bob Jones University teacher who inspired Brother Charlie while he
was still a student at Tennessee Temple College in Chattanooga, can document
the elusive reference. "I never heard of it before," says Garlock
over the telephone, gently but firmly extricating himself from the ministry of
Charlie Boykin. "I try to steer away from sensational things like that
statistic." [...]

Perhaps,
however, Boykin got the pregnancy theory, if not the actual statistics, from
the Population Institute in New York
City. In 1975 this organization felt there was a link
between rock lyrics and the rise in the number of unwed mothers. The institute
started a project to "raise the consciousness of the record industry"
even though they admitted there was "no statistical evidence linking any
one song to the sharp increase in the number of U.S. teenagers having pregnancies
outside wedlock."

http://newspaperarchive.com/lowell-sun/1975-04-15/page-27/

Lowell Sun [MA], 15 April 1975, p. 27

Campaign
underway to clean up some rock lyrics

By
David T. Cook

Christian
Science Monitor

WASHINGTON -- A campaign has begun to clean up the lyrics of
popular songs that glorify childbearing outside a formal family setting to a
largely teen-age audience.

More
responsible rock record lyrics could play a part in solving the rapidly rising
number of unmarried teen-age mothers, some population experts say.

The
Population Institute, a New York City-based organization supplying information
on population matters recently started a three-year project to "raise the
consciousness of the record industry," says Norman Fleishman, West Coast
director of the Institute.

The
Population Institute admits that it has no statistical evidence linking any one
song to the sharp increase in the number of U.S. teenagers having pregnancies
outside of wedlock. [...]

NORTH
BEND -- Imagine downtown North
Bend around 1910: Wooden planks lined Sherman Avenue, horses and horseless
carriages shared the streets and upstairs from the saloon that is now Roger's
Zoo was a brothel.

Legend
has it, a tunnel ran from the saloon’s basement beneath Sherman
and connected with the Humbolt
Building. That way, men
could enter the whorehouse discretely. [...]

The
Lagos State Police Command has debunked claims that 13 persons died in the
state after taking oranges.

A
statement released by the Command on Sunday, and signed by its spokesperson,
Ngozi Braide, described the news making the rounds on social networks as false.

"The
Commissioner of Police considers this rumour false, as none of the Divisional
or Area Command Headquarters in Lagos
have received any complaint with regards to such, from the public," the
statement read.

The
news about deadly oranges led to some apprehension in the state, with the
information warning people to stay away from oranges.

One
of such information being passed round says: "Please stop taking orange!
The Nigeria Police has announced this morning that they have confirmed 13
people dead in Lagos,
and the orange is spreading faster. Please inform others. Send this to all your
friends and family if you love them." [...]